


13

by cridecoeur



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-14
Updated: 2011-06-14
Packaged: 2017-10-20 10:19:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/211732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cridecoeur/pseuds/cridecoeur
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>People you pass in the halls hum with their life stories, like the plucked strings of a violin, resonating on a tuning fork, and you wonder how it is that no one else can hear them, how it is that no one else can catch the tune.</p>
            </blockquote>





	13

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not going to lie to you, this is pretentious. Which you probably guessed based on the fact that it's in 2nd person. I've been told it works well for this piece? Of course, the people who told me that could have lying. But I'm hoping not.

1.

The needle slides in and pricks the vein. Somewhere there is a television trickling the evening news down a hallway; the words wobble and bend in the light, as if relayed underwater, as if split by a prism, as if you are going out of your mind. Impossible. You have never been so cognizant. People you pass in the halls hum with their life stories, like the plucked strings of a violin, resonating on a tuning fork, and you wonder how it is that no one else can hear them, how it is that no one else can catch the tune. You are soon vomiting in the bin by your bed. The people continue to hum.

2.

“You’re thinking. It’s annoying.”

3.

On a taxi ride across the city you immerse yourself into the driver’s tedious life, simply so the numbness won’t settle to your bones. The lens of his watch speaks to you of carelessness, scratched, that it was a gift he was given a long time ago and since has taken for granted, even coming to dislike it because it reminds him of -

That he wears it when it has stopped tells you he wears it out of long habit, that he puts it on unthinkingly, often forgetting to take it off when -

The water under the glass tells you he has submerged his hands while wearing it, forgetting to take it off, again, being so used to having the thing on that, at a crucial moment, he forgot he was even wearing it, or thought it would not give him away after he -

The hair tangled in his watch band, long and fine, tells you it was a woman he held down under water, recently, as he has not yet noticed the watch has filled with water and stopped and certainly has not yet seen fit to pick the hair out of the links.

That it was his wife he drowned in the tub before he left for work is only conjecture, but you prove to be correct.

4.

The needle slides in and pricks the vein.

5.

You lied to him when you said there were no heroes in this world. And for several yawning seconds you thought you had been betrayed by the only one you had, before you were even cognizant of the fact that you had him, before a man whose name twisted in and out of your grip stepped out of the shadows beside the pool and played the last hand of a very great game.

6.

You hear London riotous with music. The streets often sound of funeral dirges or of the trumpets blown before battle. No one else seems to hear her true sounds. They do not know the clockwork ticking of your city’s guts like you do. But you have buried your very hands into her chest, and you can feel her heart pulsing even when you sleep.

Perhaps that is why you do not sleep very often.

7.

The people continue to hum.

8.

He could be anyone. You might have missed him on the street, you with all your genius could have overlooked this man who did not hesitate to kill for you and then laugh with you afterwards as if life and death were a very great game. You would meet one more man like that, who would lead you on the most thrilling chase of your life, but he would, instead of preserving your life, do his very best to end it.

Likely, he would have laughed, too, in the event that he had succeeded.

9.

You have slept in many hospital beds - mostly through Mycroft’s intervention because you would just have happily languished on the couch in your flat, having very little difficulty in obtaining morphine on your own, without the intervention of a doctor - but few times have you slept in a chair beside a hospital bed, keeping futile guard over the life of another man, a comrade, a friend. This man may in fact be the only man whose life you feel a terrible need to preserve, whose inevitable death has already left a dark impression in your mind, a cold and terrible place.

You did not fear death until you met John Watson, and afterwards you felt as if his last drawn breath would also be your own, that it would have to be, lest that dark place in which his death rested utterly consume you.

10.

The needle slides in and pricks the vein.

11.

You once watch a movie with John - at John’s behest and then only in between phases of an experiment - about a computer that teaches itself by playing games. At the end of a thin-worn plot and on the brink of launching all the US’s tactical nukes, the computer learns, by playing against itself in tic-tac-toe, that some games, like war, can only be won by not being played at all.

You will think of that, of that old computer running through scenarios of an impossible to win nuclear war, when you level a gun at Moriarty. The only way for either of you to win this game, this very great game is to never have played it to begin with. There was only one way this was ever going to end.

Stalemate. Nonsense.

You overturn the board.

12.

The world starts with an explosion: chemical breakdown, extreme gas pressure, rapid decomposition and expansion. Messy. Inelegant. But effective. Afterwards the world is dark. Your jacket is wet. The smell of chlorine is hardly detectible past the chemical stench of… Cyclotrimethylene-trinitramine. Polyisobutylene. Motor oil.

John is alive. You are alive. You will not believe Moriarty is dead until you see him.

They do not find him under the rubble. You are hardly surprised.

 _Burn your heart out_ , he said. _We both know that’s not true_ , he said. You have never wanted to kill someone more in your life. Despite what they say, you have never wanted to kill someone before, at all. But like so many roles, you will take on that of murderer if only you are given the chance. You can put on emotions like a man putting on a mask, a flick of your wrist and you are grieving or manic or gloating, but this hatred - this hatred will not leave you.

13.

The people continue to hum.

**Author's Note:**

> I've been watching the hit counts on this post rise with mild incredulity (I didn't even cross post it, why). I, for one, likely would never have clicked on this after seeing it was in second person (no seriously, _why_ ). You are braver souls than I.


End file.
